China Spends More on Internal Security than Defense

I saw a couple of articles today on the subject of China’s budget that recognized it is spending more on internal security than Defense - about 20% more.  Josh Chin did the story for the Wall Street Journal.  They have focused quite a bit of their increases in Xinjiang and Tibet, where local police have new technologies (he left out facial recognition which is expanding quickly in China), and numbers.  The comparison numbers are said to be equivalent to internal policing in the U.S. though I doubt those numbers.  Forbes has an article on policing that shows much less spending in the U.S. than those cited for China, though a few major Cities like New York exceed those amounts per person.  Outside the major cities, nowhere near those amounts are being spent.

It is hard to make a comparison on internal security in the US and that of China.  The US does not do the kind of internal security - it doesn’t issue national IDs; it dosn’t require travel permits to go from one part of the country to another;  it doesn’t have the facial recognition infrastructure or DNA databases that China has;  it doesn’t have the censorship roles of policing and enforcement of social media content.  Those have to be very expensive to maintain.  It is no surprise they spend more on internal security than defense.